Last week, the world lost a great servant leader and policy entrepreneur, Edwin J. Feulner, PhD., founder and longtime president of The Heritage Foundation.
I had the honor of working closely with Ed from 2001 to 2005 as his Chief of Staff at The Heritage Foundation. He was my boss, then he was my mentor, and over the years he became my enduring and dear friend.
However, real life doesn’t always play out like a Schoolhouse Rock civics lesson.
Consider NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act.
If you want evidence of artificial intelligence’s lifesaving potential, log out of ChatGPT and, instead, check out what’s happening in Virginia Tech’s Civil and Environmental Engineering program. Researchers there are building a model that uses deep learning to predict where flooding from hurricanes will occur.
These obsolete laws still on the books would be comical if they weren't so constricting.
The point is that we will need a significant number of data centers and considerable energy to power them, not just in the United States. Just as we need military partnerships with our global allies, in this modern era of data, we need data partnerships with our allies.
Congress recognized that conservation plays a critical role in global security and improved cooperation among countries when it passed the U.S. Foundation for International Conservation Act (USFICA) last December, as part of a nearly $1 trillion defense spending package.
As the Trump administration angles for peace between Ukraine and Russia, the real driving force that will bring calm to the region — while benefiting the United States — is a critical mineral deal with America.
To understand why, we must first recognize why critical minerals are so essential.
Innovation, investment, and the cleanest possible energy production thrive best in freer markets that encourage competition instead of having politicians pick winners and losers. That, in a nutshell, is the lesson of the latest Free Economies are Clean Economies report.
But there is a way to move even more quickly. The place to unleash new technology is on land already controlled and secured by the U.S. government: American military bases and National Laboratories. With the stroke of a pen, the administration could open up the development of data centers co-located with new energy projects at these locations.
Changing climate doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone everywhere. To some, warming will mean that already hot places will become even more temperature-challenged. To others, it might actually create new opportunities for things like growing food and new crops.
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